Yale University Press, 2017

How can communities help sustain the health of Lake Superior in the face of mining, climate change, forest change, invasive species, and emerging chemicals of concern?  The challenges facing Lake Superior are many--yet local, regional, and international communities overcame enormous threats to the lake's ecosystems  in the past century.  

Sustaining Lake Superior asks: What can we learn from the recoveries around Lake Superior over the past century, as we face new interconnected challenges from climate change, synthetic chemicals, and forest change?

Nancy Langston, Sustaining Lake Superior,  TedxNMU
Lake Superior has witnessed several significant conservation success stories in the past half century:
  • the recovery of forests after the devastation of the cutover era
  • the recovery of fisheries after the collapse of fish populations from overfishing, industrialization, habitat loss, and invasive species in the second half of the 20th century,
  • the substantial cleaning up of many toxic waste sites 
​None of these recoveries are complete: the recovered forests are very different than the forests that were logged so quickly, toxics still present huge challenges, a new mining boom is underway just as regulations are being relaxed, and fisheries are certainly not fully recovered.  Yet they are still significant, and they offer us hope as we face new environmental challenges, trying to shape resilient strategies in the face of an uncertain future.
 
“A stirring biography of a most important place. Writing with insight and passion at the confluence of geography, ecology, and history, Nancy Langston connects the human story to that of the world’s largest lake, an enigma to many of us and an endangered species that affects all of us. Her voice is clear and honest, though never judgmental; it conveys welcome answers and hope for the future.”—Jack E. Davis, author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea

The Author

Nancy Langston lives on the Keweenaw Peninsula in the Lake Superior watershed. Since 2013, she has been professor of environmental history at Michigan Technological University in Houghton MI. She is in the Department of Social Sciences, the College of Forest Resources and Ecosystem Sciences, and the Great Lakes Research Center.

She was awarded the Distinguished Professorship of Environmental History at Michigan Tech in the summer of 2018. That same year she won the American Society for Environmental History's Distinguished Service Award, and she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Umeå University in 2014.  During 2012-2013, she was the King Carl XVI Gustaf Professor of Environmental Science, in residence in the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious studies at Umeå University. 

For 17 years, she was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Past-president of the American Society for Environmental History, from 2010-2013 she served as  editor of the flagship journal in the field, Environmental History. 

​Author of 4 award-winning books, 49 peer-reviewed articles, and dozens of popular pieces in outlets as diverse as the New York Times, High Country News, e360, and Places Journal, she has received fellowships from the Marshall Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies. 
​
Nancy is donating all proceeds she receives from book sales to local nonprofits working to protect and restore Lake Superior. She's happy to do book talks and signing for Lake Superior groups and donate the profits from book sales to the local group. Email her to arrange this: [email protected]
Contact
​Nancy Langston
Professor of Environmental History
Great Lakes Research Center and Department of Social Sciences
Michigan Technological University
[email protected]